1918 photograph of a human ‘American Eagle’ by Arthur Mole, using 12,500 servicemen and nurses at Camp Gordon, Atlanta.
Photograph: Chicago History Museum

Arthur Mole has one of those comically unassuming names (a sort of adult version of Adrian Mole), and when he appeared on the US game show I’ve Got A Secret in 1962 he lived up to the stereotype: neat, nervous, monosyllabic, surprised to be appearing on national television. He looked as though he’d been selling insurance all his life.

Mole was 73 at the time, and living in retirement in Florida. He had been out of the public eye for 40 years, but the panel unearthed his secret with surprising ease once they’d been given a brief glimpse of a photograph of Woodrow Wilson he’d taken in 1918. This was no ordinary photograph of the US’s president during the first world war: it was an image composed of 21,000 soldiers assembled by Mole and his photographic partner John Thomas at Camp Sherman in Chillicothe, Ohio. They were the raw material from which Mole created what he called a “living photograph” – one of more than 30 he took after the US entered the war in 1917.

Mole, a commercial photographer in Chicago back then, told the panel on I’ve Got A Secret that he had visited 18 US military camps and training bases during and immediately after the war. His aim was to create patriotic photographs that countered the isolationism to which parts of American society were periodically prone. It was on Memorial Day 1917 that he first assembled 10,000 sailors from the Naval Training Station in Great Lakes, Illinois, to create an image of a rippling US flag for use in a magazine called The Recruiter. Another 30 or so living photographs – grand projects involving up to 30,000 military personnel – followed over the next three years.

The images Mole produced have now been collected in a book called Living Photographs, with an introduction by historian Louis Kaplan. He says Mole’s “widely distributed photographs and postcards imaged and imagined American community at a moment of heightened patriotic fervour and national self-consciousness”, and functioned “as a type of war propaganda”. Kaplan is good at dissecting the meaning of the images; less good at the mechanisms by which they were commissioned and distributed. Mole travelled to camps all over the US, but it is not clear how his “mass ornaments”, as Kaplan calls them, were funded and whether Mole took a cut on all the patriotic postcards that resulted.

It would also be good to hear from the tens of thousands of men (and a few women – as in the Woodrow Wilson photograph) who took part in the process. I chanced upon a press cutting, with the sub-heading “Doctor Thought Petty Officer Was Crazy”, from the Chicago Tribune of 8 July 1967 in which a local surgeon recalled without evident enthusiasm having been one of the sailors involved in the making of the original “Living American Flag”. “It was a cold day,” recalled Dr Edwin C Reynolds, “and I dressed in my white summer uniform and stood in the third white stripe on the bottom of the flag.” Presumably he had not joined the navy to be part of the third stripe in one of Arthur Mole’s living photographs.

Kaplan mentions that Mole’s Human Statue of Liberty – one of his most famous images – was made on a “stifling hot day” at Camp Dodge in Des Moines, Iowa, in July 1918, with temperatures soaring above 100F. With the 18,000 men who make up the picture having to stand around for hours until Mole – atop a rickety 75ft wooden tower and directing operations through a megaphone – was ready to take the shot, one assumes things became a little fractious, even given military discipline and the upswelling of patriotic pride as victory in the war approached.

Mole and Thomas – the latter’s role was to position the cast of thousands down below – used to take a week or more to plan their photographs, staking out the ground with tape and deciding how many people should be in each part of the picture. Density was the key to achieving perspective, and on I’ve Got A Secret the show’s host Garry Moore – with occasional interpolations from Mole – explained how the three-dimensionality of the “Human Statue of Liberty” was achieved by putting most of the participants into the torch, giving it a sense of heft compared with the more thinly populated remainder of the image.

My first thought when I saw these photographs was that they were quasi-fascistic – forerunners of all those exercises in mass choreography beloved of Soviet Russia, China and North Korea, where the bodies of the masses are artfully employed to some dubious aesthetic end, notably in Olympic opening ceremonies. There is more than a hint of the Nuremberg rallies about them – could Hitler and his artificer-in-chief Albert Speer have been influenced by Mole? – and, as Kaplan points out, they are also in the same visual ballpark as choreographer and movie director Busby Berkeley’s elaborate, depression-defying 1930s filmic confections.

Soldiers in position for the Liberty Bell shot. Photograph: Chicago History Museum

The photographs are, in other words, resplendently and repellently of their time – a time when individual rights counted for little beside collective will, and when nationalism, the bastard son of patriotism, was metastasising into fascism. We can’t blame all this on the unassuming Mr Mole, but we do have to recognise that his living photographs embody an ethos that led directly from one bloody conflict to another.

Kaplan is alert to all this, and explains how a project that began as an expression of fellow feeling – Mole and Thomas were part of a religious community in Zion, Illinois, and their earliest living photographs were of religious symbols composed of members of their congregation – became a vehicle for something more questionable. Kaplan singles out Mole’s Machine Gun Insignia, staged in 1918 at Camp Hancock in Georgia, in which 22,500 men and 600 machine guns were deployed to create what Kaplan calls a “living machine gun” mirroring the insignia of the Machine Gun Training Centre (complete with obligatory American eagle).

Mole was born in Essex in 1889 and went to the US at the turn of the century with his family, who were followers of Christian utopian John Dowie, to join the community at Zion. Kaplan suggests Mole’s desire to prove himself a worthy son of his adopted homeland was one inspiration for his living photographs, and points to the paradox at their heart. “This total subjection of the individual to the symbolic order,” he says, “exposes the fascistic tendency inherent in such images as something that counters any democratic will of the people expressed by such photographic formations of community.”

Mole thought the use of people to embody patriotic icons and military symbols made the latter come alive, yet in using thousands of faceless individuals to create such images he was in effect suppressing their humanity. “The emblem,” says Kaplan, “only comes into focus when the living element drops out of the group portrait in these spectacular optical illusions.” This was a point the assorted comedians and beauty queens on the TV panel missed back in 1962 when Mole agreed to let them in on his strange secret.